Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller

by O'Connor, Sean

  Across London, Spooner arrived at a comfortable, red-brick house in suburban Wimbledon. The house, standing proudly on the corner of Merton Hall Road, was a substantial three-storey semi-detached residence in a very respectable area, surrounded by avenues of trees and backing on to open playing fields. Spooner introduced himself to Mr and Mrs Heath, who were apparently a very decent couple in their fifties. William Heath was the manager of the Waterloo Station branch of Faulkner’s, a chain of hairdressing shops, and his wife was a housewife. Bessie Heath told Spooner that her son had always been secretive, and was prone to being excitable which sometimes overcame him and made him sick. Heath’s father told Spooner that Neville drank rather heavily, usually beer, but alcohol didn’t seem to affect him. Neither of his parents had any information about their son’s association with women, who he appeared to shun.15 Though he was not unduly conceited, he was very particular about his appearance and bathed most mornings.16

  After interviewing Mr and Mrs Heath, Spooner searched Heath’s bedroom and took away some of his personal possessions including books, papers – and four whips.

  He also took Heath’s address book. This contained the names, addresses and telephone numbers of over 300 women.17

  The post-mortem on Margery Gardner took place that night at 10 p.m., attended by both Spooner and Symes, where Simpson was able to make a more thorough examination of the body.18

  Margery’s breasts had been so savagely bitten that one nipple was hanging loose; the other was found, bitten off, under her body. Turning the body over, Simpson counted seventeen lash marks, many of them so severe that the diamond weave pattern of the whip and its ferrule-like metallic tip were imprinted on her flesh. Nine of the lashes were on her back and buttocks, six were on the right side of the body injuring the breast, chest and abdomen and the remaining two were on the head over the left and right brow. The lashes were so clearly defined that Simpson was able to measure them with mathematical precision. The left-hand side of Margery’s face had been bruised by two blows or punches. There was also a group of bruises under the chin consistent with someone gripping it to prevent her head from moving.

  The wound from which the blood had seeped when Spooner tilted the body was a seven-inch long tear of the vagina running four inches up the right wall and a further three inches across the back. It had been caused by a ‘tearing instrument such as a whip or cane’ being thrust into her and savagely rotated. The actual cause of death was asphyxia due to suffocation, though there was no indication of strangulation. Speculating about the order in which the injuries might have occurred, Simpson felt that the whip lashes took place first, followed by the blows to the face. The assailant then gripped Margery’s jaw with his hand and then her arms. After this he savaged her nipples with his teeth, then penetrated her vagina with the haft of the whip. Finally he forced her face into the bedding, ending her appalling ordeal by suffocating her. Simpson also confirmed the telling detail that Margery’s face had been washed after her death.

  Though the injuries had taken place before she died it was not possible to ascertain whether or not Margery was conscious during the attack. She may have been rendered unconscious by the two blows to the head. She was certainly made helpless by the knotted handkerchiefs around her legs and wrists. She could also have been gagged, which may have contributed to her suffocation. This would also account for the fact that none of the nearby guests heard any screams from the room, despite the excruciating pain Margery must have suffered.

  Simpson concluded that the injuries were the consequence of ‘a most violent and sadistic sexual assault’.19 Having investigated the lash marks and the internal injuries to the vagina, Simpson was convinced that these injuries had all been executed with the diamond weave whip. ‘If you find that whip,’ he told Spooner, ‘you’ve found your man.’20

  Another clue that the post-mortem yielded was the handkerchief that had bound Margery’s feet together. This bore the name ‘L. Kearns’ handwritten in black ink and also had an embroidered ‘K’ in blue silk cotton in one corner. This clearly didn’t belong to Margery as it was a man’s handkerchief and she had a clean and pressed one bearing her name in her handbag. So, who was this man Kearns and how was he involved in Margery’s death? At the time it seemed to Reg Spooner that the hunt was on for two men, both potential killers, both on the loose – and judging by the brutality of the attack on Margery Gardner – both extremely dangerous.

  Given how clear the case against Neville Heath looked, Spooner issued a memo to the Police Gazette and to the press with a description and photograph of him as well as a request for information regarding the owner of the handkerchief. This memo was dispatched to every newspaper editor in the country and arrived on their desks on Saturday morning. But by Monday morning, Spooner had a change of heart. Though he needed the press to help trace Heath as swiftly as possible, he worried that the photograph might compromise a future court case. The taxi driver’s identification of Heath as the last person to be seen with Margery alive would be crucial. If the defence could prove that the driver had already seen a photograph of Heath in the newspapers, his evidence would be compromised and it might make it impossible to prove his guilt.

  Another memo was hastily issued by Scotland Yard, withdrawing the photograph from all newspaper publication. Any deviation from the police’s directive would be followed by the full force of the law. Consequently, though written descriptions of Heath appeared in all newspapers, the photograph was completely withdrawn from circulation.

  In connection with the death of Margery Gardner at Pembridge Gardens on the night of 20/21 June the Commissioner of Police of the metropolis requests editors to kindly refrain from publishing any photograph of Neville George Clevely Heath as publication will seriously prejudice any subsequent court proceedings.21

  In the months to come, this controversial memo was to lead to questions in the House of Commons. Within days it was to have a tragic, indeed fatal, impact.

  PART TWO

  Neville George Clevely Heath

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Rake’s Progress

  6 JUNE 1917 – 12 JULY 1938

  It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man . . . whether to follow uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and re-shape his course accordingly. I tried to do the latter, and I failed . . . However it was my poverty and not my will that consented to be beaten. It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses – affections – vices perhaps they should be called – were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages.

  Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 1895

  Neville George Clevely Heath was born at home in a Victorian bay-fronted terraced house at Dudley Road, Ilford on 6 June 1917. The world he was born into was dominated by war, violence and loss – themes that for him, and for many of his generation, would characterize and define their lives.

  The newspapers that day headlined a further offensive in Belgium where the British army was still fighting for control of the city of Ypres.1 Unseasonally wet weather had turned the battlefields into a sea of mud and by October that year, British casualties would mount to over 159,000. This, the ‘most gigantic, grim, futile and bloody fight ever waged’,2 became known to history as the Battle of Passchendale. At home, southern England was also being terrorized by German raids. By this point in the Great War, Zeppelin airships had largely been replaced by a newer and much more powerful aircraft – the sinister Gotha Bomber. On the evening of 5 June a great battle took place over the Thames between the Imperial German Air Force and the Royal Flying Corps; bombs dropped across the south and east coasts and the inland south-eastern counties. The Evening Standard noted that picturedromes and tearooms quickly emptied as crowds sought to find a vantage point to watch the extraordinary air battle.

  Our gunners smashed their formation almost at a volley, scattered them like fluttering
birds, sent cones of bursting shells over them, around them, straight at them. The Huns had the gaping six miles of estuary below them. They pelted bombs down. Many hit the water. Great columns of water surged up and the din was terrific.3

  The German planes were driven away by Royal Naval Air Service pilots resulting in the loss of ten ‘Hun’ aircraft. German air raids continued throughout the month and 300,000 Londoners sought nightly shelter in tube stations, just as they would do a generation later.

  Heath’s parents later claimed that their son had been born in an air raid and that this ill-starred beginning must in some way have contributed to his complex personality. As early as 1938, when Heath was sent to borstal, his father was citing the air raid as the reason for his son’s excitable and highly strung nature.4 Reg Spooner, thorough as ever, examined records of enemy action and found that no air raids were recorded in Ilford on 6 June itself. But there is no reason to doubt the Heaths’ testimony, as they are generally reliable and honest. It may be that Bessie Heath’s labour started on the evening before – the day of the raid over the southeastern counties. This is the first of the many confusions that occur throughout Heath’s life and story. Three doctors and two nurses attended the labour and Heath’s head was ‘badly damaged by instruments at [his] birth’,5 suggesting a forceps delivery. This would have been necessary if Mrs Heath was exhausted or if the baby was becoming distressed. Air raid or not, Heath’s birth was clearly traumatic.

  After his trial, Heath’s parents were at pains to search their memories for incidents from their son’s childhood that might have affected his emotional or psychological development. Their well-intentioned attempts to uncover a forgotten clue or some inherent pattern that could justify his later actions might seem a little unscientific. Was there a genetic root to his aberrant behaviour? Bessie Heath revealed that her uncle, William Clevely, had been confined to a mental home for most of his life and had died, institutionalized, in 1938. ‘He was quite small when he set his bedclothes alight and bedroom on fire – and the shock was so great that his brain never grew on normal lines again,’ she stated.6 She observed that her son had ‘always been susceptible to shock’ and her husband concurred in a letter to Heath whilst in prison, reassuring his son that ‘any kind of shock has always been the thing to upset you most’.7 As well as reiterating the damaging psychological effects of being born into a world at war, they searched for concrete physical reasons to justify their son’s acts – a broken wrist or a fractured elbow in childhood, maybe? For surely, to commit such horrific acts, to cause such pain and suffering – there must be a reason? But perhaps these are the desperate questions that any parent in the Heaths’ circumstances would ask themselves. Where did we go wrong? Are we, as parents, in some way responsible?

  Heath’s father, William, was born in 1890 into a respectable, hard-working, lower-middle-class family from Highbury, north London. William’s father had trained as a copperplate engraver of maps and charts, but then set up his own business, running an hotel.8 William himself worked as an assistant clerk with the civil service. Bessie Clevely was the daughter of a printer and had also been born in London, a little further north than William in Stoke Newington. In 1899, the Clevely family had moved some distance away to Ilford in Essex. This could be because the Clevelys had relatives there, as the whole Heath family, after the traumatic events of 1946, moved back to the area in the 1950s.

  In April 1913, 23-year-old William Heath married Bessie Clevely at St Alban’s, Ilford – a classic pressed red-brick church – just around the corner from Bessie’s parents’ house at 35 Dudley Road. This was to be William and Bessie Heath’s first married home and where they would live with their extended family for the duration of the First World War. William Heath had been registered as a ‘warehouseman’ at the time of his marriage and as a ‘soft goods traveller’ at the time of Heath’s birth, but it’s very likely that he saw active service at some point during the war. The Military Service Act in January 1916 made conscription compulsory for single men between eighteen and forty-one. Married men like William were only exempt until May 1916. By the end of the war, 25 per cent of the total male population had joined the army, a total of 5 million men.

  Of the many English towns that are the backdrop to Heath’s story, Ilford seems to have changed the most – not only because of wartime bombing and 1960s urban planning – but because of post-war immigration. A large Asian community of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs now resides in the quiet and ordered streets around the Heaths’ first home in Dudley Road. Hindu temples have replaced Anglican churches, front gardens concreted over to accommodate people carriers. Only half an hour from London by train, it’s not the first time in its history that Ilford has undergone a dramatic cultural change. For over 1,200 years, Ilford had been a small village in Essex, part of the parish of Barking. But after the first rail link from Liverpool Street was constructed in the 1870s, the entire character of Ilford changed, and the town evolved with great speed into a dormitory suburb. With the advent of the railway, it was a comfortable commuting distance from central London and would house the clerks, assistant managers, teachers and shop workers – like the Clevelys and the Heaths – who served the booming city of London at the zenith of its imperial potency. Developers bought up large areas of land specifically for housing developments with the intention of attracting the new breed of owner-occupiers. Thousands of homes were built to suit the budgets of blue- and white-collar workers, from domestic staff to managing directors. In many cases even the deposit was the subject of a short-term loan provided by the builders. Shops, swimming pools, theatres, cinemas and libraries all followed as Ilford developed into a sedate and self-sufficient satellite of the metropolis. The expansion of the area was extraordinary; in 1881 Ilford had a population of 7,645 – by 1911, it had rocketed over tenfold to 78,188.9

  By the 1920s, Ilford was established as a mature and fashionable suburb, but in 1922 the town was shaken by a story of sex and violence that took place on a politely ordered avenue and within an archetypal family that had come to define the comfortable but aspiring middle class that typified the area. This story – which was to wreck the lives of several local families – would anticipate the fate of the Heaths as well as touching their lives with an extraordinary, chilling coincidence.

  Good-looking and sophisticated, Edith Thompson and her husband Percy were typical of the commuter families that had settled in Ilford. Edith was a professional woman who managed a hat shop in central London. Having married the dull and occasionally violent Percy Thompson, her head had been turned by a young man serving in the merchant navy, Frederick Bywaters, whom she had been introduced to by her younger sister, Avis. Looking for a room in the area when home from sea, Bywaters became the Thompsons’ lodger. Nine years Edith’s junior, he was handsome, virile and full of stories about his exotic travels abroad. Soon after he moved into the Thompsons’ house at 41 Kensington Gardens, Bywaters and Mrs Thompson began an affair. When he was away at sea, Edith fuelled the relationship with a series of letters, heavily influenced by the romantic fiction she voraciously consumed, but also chronicling the journey of their own sexual relationship in intimate detail. She poured out her love for Bywaters and her desperate desire to be rid of her husband. She even suggested that she had dosed Thompson’s food with poison and ground glass from an electric light bulb. This became the tabloid image of Edith Thompson – a ‘Messalina of the Suburbs’10 who used her age and experience first to seduce the naïve Bywaters and then to entice him to kill her husband. But this image proved to be a fantasy – a melodramatic attempt on Edith’s behalf to keep Bywaters excited by the relationship during his time away at sea, whilst she remained at home, submitting uncomfortably to her husband in the bedroom. When Bywaters returned to England, Percy Thompson became aware of his wife’s adultery and confronted the lovers, telling Bywaters to leave the house immediately. Bywaters did so, but insisted at the same time that Thompson should give his wife a divorce.11


  On 3 October 1922, the Thompsons were returning home from the Criterion Theatre at Piccadilly Circus, having caught the 11.30 p.m. train from Liverpool Street, arriving at Ilford Station around midnight. Whilst they were walking along a part of Belgrave Road that was unlit by streetlamps, an assailant rushed past the couple and attacked Percy Thompson with a knife, pushing Edith aside. She cried out, ‘Oh, don’t, oh don’t!’ in ‘a most piteous manner’. Percy collapsed against the wall. The Thompsons were only 54 yards from home.

  Bessie Heath’s older brother, Percy Clevely, was then living with his wife at 62 Mayfair Avenue, a few minutes’ walk from the Thompsons’ house. On the night of the murder, Percy had also been walking home from Ilford Station with a friend, Dora Pittard. Suddenly, Edith Thompson ‘seemed to come out of the darkness’, running towards them, hysterical and incoherent. She said that her husband had fallen down and was ill and that she desperately needed help. She wanted to know if they knew of a doctor? Percy Clevely and Dora took Mrs Thompson to a Dr Maudsley at 62 Courtland Avenue who said he would come and help. Mrs Thompson ran ahead and when Clevely and Dr Maudsley arrived, they found Percy Thompson propped up against a wall with his wife kneeling over him. Dr Maudsley struck a match and examined Thompson, but he was by then already dead. Percy Clevely asked Mrs Thompson what had happened and she said that she couldn’t say. Something had ‘brushed’ or ‘flew’ past them and then Percy had collapsed. When Dr Maudsley told Edith that her husband was dead, she asked, ‘Why did you not come sooner and save him?’